Take Your Project To The Next Level With A Pro Stylist!

For many traditional Chrysler lovers, there’s no question as to the end goal of their Mopar project: bring it back to stock-appearing at all costs. That’s an admirable goal for many owners and many cars, but it’s not the only choice. For a variety of reasons, you may want to consider other alternatives and build your ride in another style besides “stock.” Pro Touring, Pro Street, restomod, street machine, altered wheelbase/AFX, and nostalgia Super Stock are all popular interpretations that vie for our admiration. This is nothing new to guys of a certain age; who among us doesn’t remember buying AMT, Monogram, or Revell model kits as a kid and agonizing over which of the three ways to build it—stock, custom, or super stock?!

As a grown adult, you will once again face that decision when you dive into your fresh Mopar project. Only this time, there’s way more than three ways to build it! In our previous story, we introduced you to Geoff Gates and Alloy Motors, who have begun to disassemble and take stock of our 1968 Plymouth Valiant project car. With the trim and glass removed, and with all the emblems and fasteners bagged and tagged, the Alloy crew will be identifying areas that need serious work like rust repair and panel straightening. Much of this is the same with any project, whether it’s a restoration or a full-on Pro Touring build. What’s different is that if you intend to deviate from stock, this particular juncture in the build is when you should plan your final appearance such as stance, wheels, tires, paint, graphics, emblems, ride height, and any other tweaks to the outward-facing sheetmetal and trim.

Gates, who is also a formally trained designer and art director, knows how critical it is to perform concept ideation prior to—rather than during—a project. He knows from experience and observation that cars designed piecemeal along the way are frequently awkward looking and unwieldy, and can be unnecessarily expensive as well. Concept ideation is the car builder’s equivalent of the carpenter’s slogan: “measure twice and cut once.” It’s the same idea behind why builders hire architects before they build houses.

In a past life, Gates was the chief creative officer of a successful Bay Area creative agency. As such, his tentacles are sunk deep not only into the car building hobby, but the international design world as well. On several occasions, Geoff Gates and Alloy Motors have had the pleasure of working side-by-side with Alberto Hernandez Mendoza, one of the brightest automotive stylists of our time. Known to friends and colleagues simply as Alberto, (you can see his work at www.coroflot.com) we’re fortunate to have him in the service of our Project Valiant for this installment.

“The real meat of this part in the series is talking about design,” says Alloy’s Gates. “Small—and big—decisions can make or break a project. One of the keys is meeting with the customer and discussing ideas for what kind of personality they want their car to portray.” After talking with us, some things bubbled to the top. Like many Mopar fans, we’re mostly interested in keeping the sleeper look, like a restored stock car that doesn’t look like it will go 11s in the quarter, but with some subtle modifications. Gates: “At Alloy Motors, we can’t leave well enough alone, so for the purposes of illustration in this article, we are going to show how we could take this buildup to 11, given a bigger budget. Alberto and I will show how we’d still design to keep the integrity of the car intact, but push elements into something a bit more modern, but not super trendy either.”

Before Alloy Motors starts a project, Alberto and Geoff Gates meet. Armed with reference photos of the car, they discuss the approach. “We’re looking at the car, what weak points we see that could use improvements, and start taking notes for any modifications we want to try,” says Gates. Alloy typically proposes two or three ideas to the client, from mild to wild.Here Alberto and Geoff are taking a look at the grille and discussing a subtle mod of cutting out the center and fabricating a new center piece that will sit further back toward the radiator support. This is a signature Alloy move. When done correctly, it will look stock to an untrained eye, but someone fluent in Mopar will notice it after staring for a bit. Design wise, this will add some depth of plane to the front of the car and a bit of aggressiveness.“Another area of the car we noticed was the side trim,” notes Geoff. This is a signature of the Valiant 200 trim level, and design-wise it seems like an afterthought, riding on top of the door handles and creating a funky tangent where the molding meets the handle. “The idea here would be to keep the molding on the side of the car to retain the sleeper look, but drop it down, fit it to the door handle, and gap it tighter,” says Geoff. “Subtlety is key here, but the Mopar geeks will call it out!”Here’s a close-up of the molding and how it interacts with the door handle, sitting near the door gap. It’s not a prime example of a good design decision, but with some re-location, it will appear stock, but look much more integrated into the car.Another subtle trick Gates likes to do is move the round 1968 marker lights on the car—as well as sometimes putting them on cars from the ’70s that have the giant rectangle reflectors. This can change the look of a car just enough, and is one reason why “sweat every detail” is the Alloy Motors tagline.One of our design directions is to really play off the sleeper look of the car. The hoodscoop was a necessity with the induction system, but nothing screams horsepower like a giant scoop on the hood. And while it’s a throwback design, this one has some of those funky tangent issues like we had with the door handles. Alloy is working out how they can hide the air induction system and go back to a stock flat hood.To attack this problem, Alloy removed the hoodscoop to check how much clearance there is. Gates shot a photo and Alberto just drew with colored pencils on top of the picture to start designing a plenum and induction system that can fit under the flat hood. Alloy will work on styling some more as they engineer and mock it up, but they think they have the room.Here you can see how Alberto drew right on the photo. It’s going to be a tight fit, but if we’re headed toward the sleeper look, ditching the hoodscoop would make a huge difference. Engineering and custom fabrication is what sets Alloy apart from just any car builder.Alloy begins with some reference photos of the car and a complete detailed line drawing, then they make a bunch of copies of this drawing and start working on top of it. Start loose, making notes and drawings on top, then tighten it up as you like the direction.Here Geoff Gates and Alberto look at some wheel options for one of the more wild versions they’re presenting. The wheel choice can make or break a build, with the wrong choice ruining a great car. You see this all the time at car shows. When picking a wheel, you want it to fit with the overall aesthetic of the car. Here, the steelies sell the sleeper look and are great on the car, but as we push to a more restomod concept, we’ll look at different choices.On the 1968 Valiant, the taillights have a distinctive angular look. This is an example of an OEM design that you can translate to a wheel choice. When looking at wheel options, Gates started looking for wheels that have a similar angular shape to them.These two wheel designs from Giovanna and American Racing have a similar look to the angular design of the taillights, so they would be a great place to start.Obviously, having the luxury of drawing the wheels on the rendering is a cheaper way of trying different options. You don’t have to spend much money to try a few different designs out on a car using this technique.So here’s where Alberto landed on the “sleeper” version of the Valiant. It retains the mostly stock look of the car with some very subtle modifications. You can see the grille centers are pushed in a bit, the marker lights are moved up, the side trim has been relocated, and the B-pillar and window surrounds have been treated to black paint.Painting the window frames satin black on the car helps it look like a no-post car when you view the car from a distance. The black blends with the glass and makes the window opening appear larger. Removing the hoodscoop plays off the sleeper look even more. We’re keeping all the chrome and trim on the car, just cleaning everything up a bit.In this rendering Alberto went for a Pro Touring look. Instead of the snorkel scoop, Alberto put a shaker hood on the car, changed the wheels to a tuner style, swapped the roof for a Dodge Dart sport roof, and tucked the bumpers. We’d also consider painting the car a slightly more modern color and treating the trim and bumpers to a satin gunmetal finish.

One of the great things about having renderings is we can scan them and work in Photoshop to change elements. Here’s two images to show what this car could look like with the Dodge’s sport roofline, the top chopped, and lowered a little. In the second one, the chop and lowering is taken too far and has gone drastically wrong.Here’s the same car rendering with some five-spoke Torq-Thrust wheels put on the car digitally. You can see how it dramatically changes the look, and they’re a ton cheaper than many options.Here, Alloy Motors kicks it up yet another notch. Here’s the same car with a 1968 Dodge Dart sport roof welded in and slightly chopped. The entire front end is modded for a very track-inspired look as well as being lowered a bit with some fender mods to fit bigger wheels. Also, check out the custom aluminum side skirts with a gill design.Here’s a rendering for a ’69 Road Runner that Alloy has been toying with. It’s a full-on restomod with Gen III Hemi power, road-course handling, and multiple finishes of black. If any readers want this car built, Alloy has a perfect un-restorable donor as a starting point.Here’s an idea Alloy Motors is kicking around to completely re-style the front end of a 1973 Plymouth ’Cuda. Gates owns the donor car, and it’s a rusty mess. This one may be the next one Alloy builds as Geoff Gates’ personal ride.This 1969 Dodge Coronet rendering shows extensive body mods including a completely integrated monocoque-style tub/frame combo. The potential donor car for this is another rusted-out hulk Gates owns.